Family Tales on Stage and Screen

By Richard C. Morais

It’s a good line, but just that. A line. Other Desert Cities, at the Booth Theater on Broadway until June 17, has all the components of a terrific family saga.

The play opens with two adult children visiting their wealthy parents out in Palm Springs at Christmas, the artifice of a perennially sunny California and the synthetic Christmas tree suggesting what is to come. The aged parents, an actor turned Californian politician (Stacy Keach), and his take-no-prisoners wife (Stockard Channing), are major fundraisers for the Republican Party and old friends of their role models, Nancy and Ronnie Reagan. No sooner have their liberal children arrived, than the hook is set.

Their depressive daughter (Rachel Griffiths of Six Feet Underfame) has written a tell-all about her dead, older brother whom the parents refuse to acknowledge anymore. This anguished woman’s Christmas present is her bitter memoir; she wants her parents’ blessing of her searing indictment of their world and their parenting skills, before the New Yorker publishes an excerpt of her book. Witnessing all this is the alcoholic aunt played by Judith Light (Ugly Betty).

Her younger brother (the excellent Justin Kirk, from Weeds and Angels In America) is a porn-obsessed television producer assigned the recognizeable family roll of “negotiator,” urging peace and reconciliation between the angry, truth-at-all-costs daughter on the one side, and the parents in denial, refusing to acknowledge the family secret, on the other. We finally learn what it is: their dead son was a radical, totally at odds with their Republican politics, who helped bomb an Army recruitment center, inadvertently killing a janitor before taking his own life. The daughter is, years later, still devastated that the older brother she adored never said goodbye to her and she blames her parents and their politics for this tragedy.

The play has all the right parts in place, including the thrill of watching a stellar cast strut its stuff, but it didn’t do it for me. It was the writing. The first act of the play is full of Neil Simon one-liners, mostly delivered by Stockard Channing and periodically peppered by “wise” family aphorisms: “Families get terrorized by their weakest members”, “Why are children allowed an endless series of free passes?”, “Lots of locked doors in her doll house.” To my ears, it all sounded a little too clever and contrived, with the constantly “acting” parents looming about the set like Reaganesque clichés.

The second act of the play, meanwhile, abruptly turns into a serious, Eugene O’Neil-type family truth-dump with a final plot twist that made me say, “Oh, puleeeeze.” The Rachel Griffiths character whines throughout the play, but has a complete change in heart when she hears the final “secret within the secret”. We know this is so, not because we see her character develop, but because we are told, in the last two minutes of the play, that she postponed the publication of her book until after her parents are dead (as they wanted all along) and that she ultimately moved in to the house next door to them in Palm Springs and took care of them in their dotage. All bows have in this way been neatly tied up.

This play is based on a truism: a generation who won’t deal with their family secret are condemned to pass their unresolved story on to future generations to deal with. It’s all very true. But something got lost in translation for me – despite the immensely watchable cast.

Leila Hatami and Peyman Maadi in “A Separation”

If you want to see a real family drama, a piece of searing storytelling that rings true from the very first frame, then I urge you to see A Separation, an Iranian film directed by Jodaeiye Nader az Simin and showing in select art house movie theaters. (For theaters showing the film in the New York metropolitan area go here. )

The film starts with a woman and man arguing before a (faceless) Iranian judge. She wants to emigrate out of Iran with her daughter, to give her daughter opportunities, but her husband won’t leave because he wants to take care of his Alzheimer-stricken father. So the wife asks the family judge to grant her license to take her daughter away from her husband. No, says the judge. The girl’s father has the final say and if he doesn’t want her to leave, she can’t.

And so the film gets rolling. They are all trapped. The mother moves out of the apartment during a trial separation, to force a change in the husband’s heart, and the couple’s grief-torn daughter decides to stay with her devoted, soft-spoken father. The wife secretly wants her husband to beg her to return; he, too proud to beg her to stay, insists it is her decision to move out or stay and work it out.

From small misunderstandings, growing out of poor family communication, starts a series of devastating plots twists, utterly mundane and believable, that have you at the edge of your seat. A housekeeper crossing a busy Tehran street, a young girl inadvertently ripping a garbage bag on the apartment building’s steps, these are all innocent-appearing occurrences that turn into key plot twists. There is not an extraneous frame in this complex film. And it is a sad, sad vision of three dimensional characters, decent family members all, descending into a slow, destructive spiral that ultimately tears the family apart.

Like all great storytelling, this family saga is firmly rooted in the society it lives in, and the insights this film offers into contemporary Iranian society is alone worth the price of admission, an invaluable piece of intelligence to the stock videos we see on the news. The family is just as much destroyed and exhausted by Iranian life – by moral police and bureaucracy and imperial judges and high unemployment and busy-body neighbors – as it is by the human foibles of the individual family members. There are no bows neatly tied up here, but, true to life, a subtle film that fades quietly on a painfully ambiguous ending.

About Penta

Written with Barron’s wit and often contrarian perspective, Penta provides the affluent with advice on how to navigate the world of wealth management, how to make savvy acquisitions ranging from vintage watches to second homes, and how to smartly manage family dynamics.

Richard C. Morais, Penta’s editor, was Forbes magazine’s longest serving foreign correspondent, has won multiple Business Journalist Of The Year Awards, and is the author of two novels: The Hundred-Foot Journey and Buddhaland, Brooklyn. Robert Milburn is Penta’s reporter, both online and for the quarterly magazine. He reviews everything from family office regulations to obscure jazz recordings.